A quartz crystal microbalance apparatus has been used to measure the room temperature uptake of water vapour by thin films of oleic acid as a function of relative humidity, both before and following exposure of the films to various partial pressures of gas phase ozone. A rapid increase in the water-sorbing ability of the film is observed as its exposure to ozone is increased, followed by a plat...

The interactions between nanosized particles and living systems are commonly mediated by what adsorbs to the nanoparticle in the biological environment, its biomolecular corona, rather than the pristine surface. Here, we characterize the adhesion toward the cell membrane of nanoparticles of different material and size and study how this is modulated by the presence or absence of a corona on the...

Adsorption of proteins onto a solid surface is believed to be the initial and controlling step in biofouling. A better knowledge of the fouling process can be obtained by controlling the formation of the first protein layer at a solid surface. A number of methods have been investigated to inhibit adsorption of proteins. In this study, the adsorption kinetics of -casein onto bimodal PEG brushes ...

Unambiguous and selective standoff (non-contact) infield detection of nitro-containing explosives and taggants is an important goal but difficult to achieve with standard analytical techniques. Oxidative fluorescence quenching is emerging as a high sensitivity method for detecting such materials but is prone to false positives—everyday items such as perfumes elicit similar responses. Here we re...

In this review, the authors discuss the challenges of studying supported lipid bilayers (SLBs) deposited by vesicle fusion in terms of (1) evaluating SLB formation and quality using quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation and (2) analyzing the composition and asymmetry of SLBs composed by lipid mixtures using complementary surface sensitive techniques. An overview of the literature is pres...

A major problem for surface-based detection techniques such as surface plasmon resonance and quartz crystal microbalances is that at low concentrations, diffusion is an insufficient driving force to bring colloidal submicron-scale particles to the detection surface. In order to overcome this, it has previously been demonstrated that a combination of dielectrophoresis and AC-electro-hydrodynamic...

The coagulation of blood plasma in response to activation with a range of tissue factor (TF) concentrations was studied with a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM), where frequency and half width at half maximum (bandwidth) values measured from the conductance spectrum near resonant frequency were used. Continuous measurement of bandwidth along with the frequency allows for an understanding of the...

This work addresses the formation and the internal morphology of polyelectrolyte layers obtained by the layer-by-layer method. A multimodal characterization showed the absence of stratification of the films formed by the alternate deposition of poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) and poly(sodium 4-styrenesulfonate). Indeed the final organization might be regarded as three-dimensional solid-s...

We demonstrate a label-free peptide-coated carbon nanotube-based immunosensor for the direct assay of human serum. A rheumatoid arthritis (RA)-specific (cyclic citrulline-containing) peptide, was immobilized to functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes deposited on a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensing crystal. Serum from RA patients was used to probe these nanotube-based sensors, and...

The electrodeposition of gold nanostructures increases the surface area of a biosensor, which brings an enhancement of the sensitivity by increasing the amount of analyte binding to the surface. To evaluate the relationship among the surface structure, the area and the analyte binding, we quantitatively analyzed them for quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensing by scanning electron microscopy...